1. Technical Field
This invention relates to automation of staff or employee scheduling. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for queue-based automated staff scheduling.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Staff scheduling is the process of matching a list of employees with a list of shifts or assignments (hereafter referred to as “assignments”) for a specified date range. The choice of a particular individual for a given assignment on a given day is generally subject to several constraints imposed by institutional scheduling policies and individual/group preferences. Scheduling a large task force in the presence of large number of such constraints, makes manual scheduling a daunting task. In many cases, it is infeasible to achieve a good schedule manually. Furthermore, the scheduling rules and preferences are rarely static. There are often exceptions to the scheduling rules and preferences based on various scheduling conditions. These problems also make it difficult to build a general purpose computer program that can automate employee scheduling.
The main challenges in automating the process are twofold:    1. How are the constraints, e.g. rules and preferences, which are specific to the institutional, social, and political environment of an organization, expressed in a form that can be represented in the internal data structures of a general purpose software system? Furthermore, how can these representations be used to express not only rules and individual preferences, but also their exceptions?    2. Once a representation has been found, what is the computational process that makes it tractable to choose a schedule among large number of possible schedules, which grow exponentially as the number of employees or assignments increases?
It would be advantageous to provide a method and apparatus that addresses these problems.